Review: VIVIC Sparkling Coffee

VIVIC is a line of ready-to-drink sparkling coffee drinks that were created with quality in mind. The products are packaged in 9.5 oz cans and come in three flavors: Original, Sarsaparilla, and Lavender.

While the base of the product has some ingredients that you’d expect (coffee, water, sugar), VIVIC is also infused with licorice root to give it an extra layer of flavor. The licorice note is mild, but it really elevate the flavor of the coffee. We’re also really pleased with the use of sugar, which at 8g per can, is quite restrained and helps keep the product at only 31 calories per can.

As for the flavors, we were most partial to the Original. The simplicity of the formula works very well: It's clean, smooth, and has just the right amount of sweetness and licorice flavor to pair with the base of coffee.

From there, it's a toss-up between t Lavender and Sarsaparilla, both of which have subtle accent flavors that are not typically found in coffee.Sarsaparilla does push the product slightly into soda territory, while the lavender adds a floral note that gives the product a flavor profile reminiscent of cascara.

Still, we question If these flavors are a bit too esoteric and far from the norm to appeal to consumers. Our opinion is that this could be solved with an additional flavor that is a bit more in the traditional wheelhouse of the coffee category.

As mentioned earlier, the product uses a 9.5 oz can with a sleeve wrap label. This container is a fine choice as far as both the coffee and sparkling categories are concerned. “VIVIC” runs vertically on all three flavors and there's an accent color and an illustration to pair with each specific flavor.

While the illustration might not be immediately obvious to a consumer looking for the first time, they do speak to the high-quality ingredients that are used to make this product. This is certainly a good thing, but we feel as though there’s something missing to glue everything together. As it stands right now, your eye has to jump around the front of the can to get a sense of what the product is. Lastly, we feel as though the bottom text area, which is currently used to call out Sonoma, CA (something that we don’t feel is very useful considering the coffee itself doesn’t come from there), could be used for something else that helps describe the product.

Putting all of this together, we think that VIVIC is one of the better sparkling coffees that we've sampled in terms of both its approach and overall execution. This comes down to something pretty simple: it’s one of the few products in this nascent subcategory that we could actually see ourselves drinking on a regular basis. Yes, there's work to do with the packaging and the overall flavor lineup (which needs another SKU), but the approach of a being a high quality and mildly flavored sparkling coffee seems like something they could have legs.